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Of course, you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you’ve lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. - You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool.

quoting susan sontag:
Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for the masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images.

He says, sometimes you say things before you’ve understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out, he says, like doing a sum on a bit of paper. You can’t always expect people to grasp it. But I want you to know what I mean, I say. So do I, he says. I want to know what you mean.
It’s late at night, too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern.

‘Having it all,’ like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires an adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary, forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise for the fact that she is essentially alone.

Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. “These wolves seem upset at something,” he observed. The next morning the cage was all twisted out of shape and the gray wolf Berserker was missing. Dracula had temporarily inhabited its body. Dracula had a totally different experience at the zoo from that of other people.

Before that summer, I knew almost nothing about the Beatles. I didn’t know why it was important to be a mop-top, or what a mop-top was. Whenever I heard older people talking about them, I just tuned it out. There were never any bad consequences. I really thought I could go through my whole life that way. But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.

He said we had to start calling it just “Ukraine,” without the definite article, because in Russian “Ukraine” meant “borderland,” and to call a whole country “The Borderland” was insulting. Apparently if you called it simply “Borderland,” people would think it was a proper name, semantically unrelated to its other instances.

We waded into the pond. Translucent minnows circled our ankles. They were so alive. It was almost pure life in those little bodies, there was so little room for anything else. The sun was low and there was a breeze. The water felt ice-cold. I felt paralyzed by the thought of going in. Then I resolved myself and dove under.

I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read

I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did—someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity. I was wrong; it was more a book about interior decoration.

I was thinking about the equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.

‘He started to snort like a little horse.’
😭😭😭😭

whole time i thought this was written by a woman… its a MAN???

In modern parlance, more leisure time means increased human capital: idleness that might otherwise be devoted to activities free of purpose and constraint are integrated into the operations of Capital.

Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not incluned to revolution so much as depression.

slow and steady wins the race

slow going but we’re persevering fr fr

She had to make a bid for a self that possessed freedoms the Big Silver took for granted — after all he had no trouble being himself.
You talk a lot don’t you?
To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take, but it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else.

That summer, in my newfound tenderness for you, there was a hint of triumph, as though I had won some strange victory over you. When one is no longer in love with a man, one cannot believe anyone else could be either, and so one glides, liberated, into a sense of security both fragile and false, like skating on thawing ice.

No camera registers as ruthlessly as the young lover’s eye once the initial wave of blindness has subsided.

this is like a puzzle

My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

We learned we wanted too much.

But why is this a matter of what to read and about where? Very simply, because critical discourse has taken no cognizance of the enormously exciting, varied post-colonial literature produced in resistance to the imperialist expansion of Europe and the US in the past two centuries. To tead Austen without also reading Fanon and Cabral - and so on and on - is to disaffiliate modern culture from its engagements